Halfway through gnawing my way deeper into the mountain, I ran face-first into something different.

I stopped, letting my mana relax around me—using it for too long was like overusing a muscle, my vague sense of it strained and stiff. After what I could estimate as hours of digging, it stood to reason I'd be tired.

But there wasn't time to worry about that, because what I had come across was not rock.

Well. It was, but it hadn't always been; some type of fiber, fossilized for untold centuries, entombed in the stone. I prodded it with a spark of mana.

Pale and twisting, it sprawled over the limestone like the veins of some monstrous creature, digging deep into every surrounding section of rock. I shifted my thoughts to careful little claws and tunneled around the fossil, freeing it all to the open air; it stuck out from the limestone like pale fingers extending from the dark.

But when I brought my mana closer to examine it, I accidentally dissolved a bare sliver from its further point.

I knew fossils—in the Ilera Sea, there was a hidden trench that only the strongest creatures could swim to the bottom of, surviving past the crushing pressure and dead water to find all the others who hadn't managed to survive. Mostly smaller fish, bones embedded in the stone they had died on, but I remembered venturing there as a younger dragon and seeing the skeleton of the greatest being to ever dominate the sea. Nearly two hundred feet long, armed with enormous jaws and fangs to cleave kingdoms, built like a crocodile but superior in every way—it had been humbling, as a sea-drake not yet out of my venomous days, to see such a titan brought low by age. None knew what had killed them, if their preferred food of whales and dragons had run out or territorial fights had brought them low, but they were dead.

And their fossils were their remains. Their dead remains.

Dead for minutes or for hundreds of years, but was there a difference to me or my mana?

Still three points left to my name after my endless burrowing, potentially enough—I gathered it around me in great billowing clouds, tugging points of awareness away from my top floor to glare at the fossils sticking placidly out of the rock. I spared a last glance at my creatures, just to make sure they wouldn't immediately crumble over and die without my watching presence.

Seros glanced up as he sensed my gaze, paddling carefully over the rock pond that barely fit his massive new size. He kept his limbs close to his sides and tried to only guide himself with his tail, spraying water over the surrounding whitecap mushrooms. His clumsiness was endearing.

You're very temporarily in charge, I impressed upon him, earning a hiss in response—Seros glanced around at the quietly existing first floor but begrudgingly dragged himself out of the pond, assuming a perch on the edge of the island. His lantern-yellow eyes swept over the floor I had appointed him guardian of.

Temporarily. I still didn't trust his particular brand of intelligence.

My jeweled jumper and horned serpent continued slumbering in their evolution-mana hazes, shapes twisting and rebuilding, but they were far enough away from the entrances if any ne'er-do-wells came in. Seros would protect them.

And thus I turned back to the fossil in my dungeon home, gathered my mana, and began to dissolve it.

I broke off a sliver from the furthest point, less than an inch of calcified fiber, and ate the white motes of mana it produced—knowledge flooded through me, intricate information about what it had been. A root of some type, much larger than from other trees, made to sit above the soil and… I narrowed my focus, dissolving a little more. Made to sit in water?

It made sense, if I stretched it. The cove was a very tropical location, and I could presume it had been so before this mountain had sprung up, give way for a water-adapted tree. I gathered a spark of mana, chose a random location in the massive empty room I was constructing, and recreated the pattern.

White tendrils spilled out across the stone.

I– hm.

Sweeping my points of awareness between the two, I could see they were functionally similar, though mine was a bit too symmetrical for a proper root cluster; but it was still clearly a fossil. I glared at the exposed roots.

I had come back to life. Clearly it couldn't be that hard.

But my normal strategy didn't look to be working—either dead for too long or plain stubborn, both of which wouldn't match up to my own particular level of obstinance. This time, I gathered my mana and instead of dissolving, I pushed it into the root.

It shuddered, bowing under its own weight, but stayed calcified. I narrowed my focus.

A full point this time, slowly threaded in like the world's most elderly grandma. I hovered overhead and slowly pressed my mana in at different points, infusing the root with various thoughts of life and growing and curses at its unwillingness to come back; it shifted again, the tip trailing towards the ground before it made to harden again–

Not on my watch. I shoved two entire points into its base.

The root groaned, the limestone around it heaving and cracking as the fossil it had once held comfortably started to loose from its grasp, eons-old water moving under its surface and shaking off the powdered calcium. Ignoring costs I pushed more mana into it, flooding the delicate system only barely reawakening–

Crack.

The stone that had housed it shattered, crumbling away to reveal a fragile root.

Vampiric Mangrove (Exotic)

Dead ages before the first sentient races, this twisted tree spreads its roots throughout rivers and canals. Using great thorns hidden under its bark, it drains blood and vitality from its victims to sustain its growth. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.